These posts are about the ecstasy of communication. Carles attempts an escape from postmodernity by announcing a retreat from his online persona. But as Baudrillard asks, "These fatal strategies, do they exist?... Faced with a delirious world, there is only the ultimatum of realism. This means that if you want to get away from the madness of the world yo have to sacrifice all of its charm as well.... In order to survive, we need to approach ever closer to the nullity of the real." Once, Carles appeared to flirt with nullity by choosing an intentionally impoverished texting-based language with which to express his nihilistic philosophy, so that form and content would approach each other asymptotically the more he would write, making the blogs extension in duration itself demonstrate that philosophy's the most significant tenet: We can continue to speak in clipped and debased language, but thought so expressed seems ever to mock itself more. Irony becomes a prerequisite condition for expression with such a set of linguistic tools. Now he must up the ante and promise silence, in his discursive efforts to theorize the end of discourse as it dissolves in incessant communication, in the palpable pressure of perpetual realtime expression.
As with Carles's earlier attempts at retirement and "digital suicide", Carles expresses an ultimately unfulfilled intention of retiring from blogging to expose how such intentions are in danger of becoming mere fantasies. It is no accident that the intention is presented as a question in the title of the first post linked above. The digital self is no longer autonomous, if it ever was autonomous in the first place. Our intentions are now subject to real-time referenda in the digital agora formed by mandatory social networking. Carles reduces this to a succinct formula: "This blog is me." What is "blogged" or expressed online in some other way is not lived or experienced from within our subjectivity. Our subjectivity is no longer stored in our brains but in water-cooler server farms located close to hydrelectric dams all across the world. Hence the preposterous premise of the film The Matrix -- we do not choose btween the real and the Real, but between no existence and digitally encoded ecstasy of the social network.
We can now only at best wish to remove ourselves from the digitization and social mediatization of our lives. We can only dream of not broadcasting the quotidian details of our lives and such and as such over the channels fashioned for us online. When Carles writes that "maybe my future is in ‘real life’ instead of the internet," the pivotal word is maybe. We are no longer in a position to see whether this is so for ourselves or not, no longer in a position to make the determination in the final analysis of whether real life and the internet can be extricated from each other.
In his return, Carles acknowledges the "readers who take this blog very seriously," of which this writer is admittedly one. Thereby Carles has cleverly forced one to consider one's own culpability in perpetuating the digital trap of consciousness. Is the act of reading itself, the digitally enhanced hermaneutics of the identity relation and its various levels of decoding, the consumer of discourse in the sense of consummating it, committing it to a great final conflagration? Is Carles really going silent precisely by continuing to blog?
Nice to have you posting again.
ReplyDelete"Irony becomes a prerequisite condition for expression" - to me this is similar to things Zizek has said (no one really 'believes' today, we joke about our beliefs and practices, but we carry on with them anyway), and I hadn't thought of this in relation to the carles blog. thanks.
"Our subjectivity is no longer stored in our brains" - I'd venture, though, that subjectivity proper (if it is and has ever been located anywhere), has never been fixed in our brains, but rather fixed in writings and images, inscriptions and texts, from which one abstracts it (so in our brains? yes, but not exclusively). This is a point Derrida and others make, no? - that the creation of an immaterial subject is itself a media effect of certain technologies, namely the written word. 'We have always been cyborgs,' yes? We've always been outside of ourselves - perhaps what's new about the Internet and so forth is that this externalization, or the turning inside out of the human, is inscribed within technologies that increasingly have a life of their own.